The Strongman

LETTER FROM INDIA about Hindu nationalist political boss Bal Thackeray... Describes the supplicants who showed up for his son’s birthday... For more than thirty years now, Thackeray has been the godfather of Bombay-or Mumbai, as he had the city renamed several years ago-and for anyone wishing to secure his favor the birthday of one of his family members is an extremely big event... His reputation for vengeance is such that, when he was lampooned, as a character called Raman (Mainduck) Fielding, by Salman Rushdie in "The Moor’s Last Sigh," he didn’t need to say a word: Mumbai bookstores didn’t stock the book for fear of reprisals, and even the central government banned it shortly afterward... In 1993, Thackeray was widely blamed for inciting anti-Muslim riots in which a thousand people died in less than a week; in the next elections, his party’s support almost doubled. As a fomenter of violence for political gain, Thackeray was a pioneer. Now other politicians are catching up with him... He never runs for office-he leaves that risky, soiling task to underlings. Instead, he holds court at home, in his sunglasses and necklaces and saffron pajamas, his hair dyed black and slicked into a modified Elvis pompadour. Bollywood movie stars pay him homage. Thackeray has been thought of as a marginal figure without credibility at the national level. But today his Shiv Sena has fifteen members in the national parliament, and one of Thackeray’s protégés is the speaker of the House... The B.J.P. and the Shiv Sena are often referred to as Hindu fundamentalist, but the term doesn’t quite fit because Hinduism has no fundament. It is Hinduism’s variegated quality that allows the Hindu right to make the argument that Hinduism is a kind of secularism, and that, therefore, Indian Muslims’ adherence to their exclusive monotheism amounts to a refusal of a secular order... Describes how Muslim personal law differs radically under the Indian system from Hindu law... The decline of the Congress Party, the left-wing party that ruled India at Independence and that for more than forty years seemed invincible, has much to do with its appalling corruption. In order to understand just what it means that Congress politicians are considered more corrupt than their fellows, it is helpful to know that, according to some estimates, one in five members of parliament and one in three members of state assemblies in India have criminal records... Comparing India’s economic depression in the nineteen-nineties with the depression in Germany in the thirties that helped bring Hitler to power, Congress politician Mani Shankar Aiyar says, "Things can happen that you don’t believe are in the realm of possibility..." At a Hindu festival last fall, Bal Thackeray made a speech in which he advised Hindus to form suicide squads in order to retaliate against Islamic terrorism...